In recent years, use cases via cooperation of apparatuses such as transferring a recorded content stored in a data storing part of a Blu-ray Disk (BD) recorder, for example, to a mobile terminal such as a cellular phone are about to become common.
As a transfer method according to a related art, a personal area network (PAN), which is based on wired communication such as a universal serial bus (USB) or bridge media such as an SD memory card have been widely used. However, in USB or the SD memory card, a cable connection or card insertion is necessary. Accordingly, from the viewpoint of the improvement in the usability of an apparatus, wireless connections between apparatuses have progressed in various fields.
In a use case that is premised on such a wireless connection, an apparatus on the other side is not limited to a stationary apparatus. Accordingly, in a mobile terminal, for example, an increase in opportunities to transfer content between the mobile terminal and an unspecified mobile terminal located at a visiting site is expected.
Each terminal serves a role of accessing the data storing part included in the other terminal (hereinafter, referred to as a “role as a host”) or a role of allowing the other terminal to access the data storing part of the terminal (hereinafter referred to as a “role as a device”). In a session of such wireless communication, it is of significance which terminal serves the role as a host or the role as a device.
The reason for this is each mobile terminal includes almost the same functions and cannot fix its role to one of the roles in many cases. In addition, the role that each mobile terminal is capable of serving varies depending on the mobile terminal. Even for the same mobile terminal, the role that the same mobile terminal is capable of serving may vary depending on user settings, for example.
In this respect, as a related art for determining the role that is necessary for such an access, for example, there is a technique disclosed in Patent Literature (hereinafter, abbreviated as “PTL”)1. According to this related art, communication apparatuses previously exchange functional information relating to the roles that the communication apparatuses are capable of serving, then compare the functional information with each other and determine the role of each one of the communication apparatuses based on a specific rule. In other words, according to the related art, each communication apparatus checks whether a communication apparatus on the other side can serve the role as a host or the role as a device via the exchange of functional information. Then, in the related art, the communication apparatus issues a request for serving any one of the roles based on the result of checking.
In such a related art, it is made possible to specify whether the communication on the other side can change the role or the like via the exchange of functional information in advance and to determine the roles of the apparatuses based on the information, whereby content transfer can be realized.